I just came from a monthly meeting, scheduled to last 2.5 hours. I counted 40 people in the room, ranging from administrative assistants to top executives. I wanted to do an unscientific estimate of the cost of the meeting. I used Meetordie (meet or die) to arrive at my total. (Thank you to Deanne Earle of Unlike Before for telling me of the site) I plugged in a few simple values and... the meeting had an estimated cost of $17,904. The information provided by the vendor, from my perspective, was not worth nearly $18,000. Please realize this is a required monthly meeting.
The slide deck was distributed to everyone on the project via email, allowing them to review the materials at their leisure. They do need to be kept informed. But, instead of going about their day, many who received the slide deck came to the meeting. We all sat in a room as the vendor read from the slides. Now, this was no Steve Jobs keynote address. The vendor pretty much read word-for-word off the slides.

Just because the vendor may be contractually obligated to have this meeting, they should propose an alternative to what they're doing. There either needs to be more value or less cost associated with this meeting.